Meat packers and their customers are demanding the production and delivery of market animals with weights that must meet progressively tighter windows for acceptable weights. Marketing animals, whose weights fall outside the specified weight ranges, usually result in significant deductions from market prices for such underweight or overweight animals.
Simultaneously, producers are increasingly conscious that underfeeding or overfeeding not only hurts their bottom line profitability, but feeding a feed that is not optimum each phase of the growth cycle unnecessarily burdens them with waste nutrient disposal costs and regulatory review.
Historically pig producers selected animals for market by simple visual inspection, relying on pig judging skills to identify market animals. Such methods are neither sufficiently accurate nor reliably consistent for modern markets. The use of single-animal farm scales, such as the Osborne Industries ACCU-ARM® scale, is sufficiently accurate to select animals for market. Using such scales has been shown to amply reward the user with a profitable payback at market for both the cost of equipment and labor for weighing.
To manage feed, phase feeding is increasingly employed, changing feed composition to match growth utility at multiple intervals during the growth cycle. These changes are best accomplished with an accurate understanding of the daily weight distribution and its rate of change for the animals. Although visual inspection or fixed calendar-based growth curves have usually been the methods used to make phase feed changes, visual inspection is approximate at best, and growth curves do not take into account the effects of environmental temperatures or pen stocking densities which both affect actual rate of gain.
Although using scales to weigh market animals or measure weight distributions is clearly desirable, weighing one animal at a time requires substantial labor and time, two commodities that are often unavailable in modern finishing operations. Furthermore, weighing animals that fail to meet the marketing range always causes a temporary, but costly interruption to their normal growth. For phase feed changes, weighing of small samples of the pen is the only practical method, but is not really much more accurate than visual estimating. If large numbers of animals must be inspected, the use of single-animal scales is simply too slow to be practical.
The first step in automated weighing must be to spread the cost and equipment maintenance over a large number of animals. This consideration leads naturally to the conclusion that managing finishing pigs in large pens is highly desirable.
Other automated sorting systems have been developed and used in the past with only limited success. The “food court” sorting system essentially groups all of the feeders into a relatively small area of the finishing room. The remainder of the finishing room is reserved as a loafing area without feeders. Both the food court and the loafing areas are provided with water.
Several weeks prior to marketing with the food court system, a sorting scale is moved into position and pigs must enter the food court through a sorting scale in order to be fed and return to the loafing area via one-way gates. At some point, a sort weight or weight range is assigned to the sort scale and the food court is divided into a market animal pen and a reject pen for pigs outside the sort range. The reject pigs can return to the loafing area via a one-way gate, but the market animals are prohibited from remixing in the loafing area by locking the one-way exit gates. After about 24-hours, the market animals are loaded out and the pen is returned to normal operation. The sort off of market animals is repeated until all animals have been selected for specific markets or fed out to meet the target ranges set earlier.
The food court system has several distinct disadvantages. For example, because the food court provides both food and water in a very compact area, the dominant pigs in the group both have no incentive to leave and can easily control access to the feeders and intimidate less aggressive pigs. This type of dominant behavior is most easily seen in adult sows, but exists with adolescent pigs as well. The food court arrangement almost ensures a wider spread of weights in the group and a longer time to market with higher facilities utilization costs.
Moreover, the automatic market scale of the food court system is used in such a way that very accurate weights are required with pigs on one pass through the scale. The pigs must be accurately separated, weighed, and then released into the market pen. Moving across such a scale with multiple moving gates requires training. Training occurs because feed is the incentive. This means that feed restriction is a necessary consequence for this training, often in the final weeks prior to market when extending the market date is least affordable.
Automatic marketing scales and the food court system both combine to increase facilities utilization costs because increasing the number of “tail-enders” is a necessary outcome for this system.
Thus, there is a need in the industry for an improved livestock management system and method for split-weight feeding that solves the problems with the prior art described above.